Becoming Belladonna

She is fifty. She has hot flashes. She is exactly who they have been waiting for.At fifty, Belladonna Blackbriar thought she knew exactly who she was.A horticulture professor at a Tucson community college. A divorced mother. A grandmother of two. A woman moving quietly through perimenopause and the strange new geography of her own body, who had accepted that her best years were behind her - and that the rest of her life would be small, careful, and her own.She was wrong about all of it.On a Friday morning at three-thirty-one, on a balcony of the Grand Floridian, Bell finally hears the voice she has been ignoring her entire life. I am Belladonna. And in the small dry register she will come to know as her permanent weather, she understands - for the first time - that she has never been the woman she thought she was.Three thousand feet beneath the eastern slope of the Appalachian mountains, a civilization has been waiting for her. A people who are not quite human. A line that descends from a king who abdicated his throne for love three centuries ago. A man who has been preparing to receive her for one hundred and fifty-seven years, four months, and twenty-eight days.A working chord, in her chest, that has - in operational fact - been ringing for her since April.She is fifty. She is exhausted. She is exactly who they have been waiting for.A slow-burn romantasy for women who are tired of being told their stories are over.Becoming Belladonna is the first book in a planned trilogy following Bell as she descends into an ancient civilization beneath the Appalachians, claims a throne three centuries empty, and falls slowly - across the long careful working interval of one impossible summer - into a love she had stopped allowing herself to imagine. A romantasy of fated love, found family, and a mature heroine who discovers, at fifty, that her life has only just begun.Inside this book you will find: - A fifty-year-old heroine navigating divorce, hot flashes, and the awakening of a self she has never met- A slow-burn romance with sensual but closed-door intimate scenes- An underground civilization with three thousand years of patient ethical philosophy- A family - daughter, grandchildren, ex-husband - held together across two worlds- A working chord, in the chest, that resolves only when the bond does- The small specific working register of a woman becoming, in operational fact, herselfFor readers of mature, character-driven romantasy who have been waiting for a heroine who looks like the women they actually know.Becoming Belladonna - Book One of a planned trilogy. The working interval ahead is waiting.